There's Not a Single State Where Polling (or Voting) Suggests Sanders is Leading

FiveThirtyEight just rolled out a new version of the projections I discussed in this piece. It incorporates several new demographic factors, including an urban/rural split. One interesting thing about it is that, if the race is tied, Hillary will be winning about fifteen states, out of fifty: this implies that her support is more strongly concentrated into a few big states where she has major advantages, where Sanders has more modest advantages across a larger number of smaller states. Or to put it another way, in order to win, Sanders really needs to feel like he's winning.

And... boy does this ever not look like a race where Sanders is winning. The first three states now look way better for Hillary: instead of implying national leads of 6, 7, and 2 points respectively, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada now imply leads of 19, 10, and 5. Meanwhile, they also put the current 538 polling averages into their latest chart, and... whaddaya know, Sanders is currently beating his benchmarks in a whopping zero states. You've got some states, like South Carolina, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Texas, and North Carolina, that don't look all that different from a tied race; Hillary's beating those benchmarks by single digits. But then you've got, jeez. Sanders ought to be winning Tennessee, narrowly; he's losing it by 25 points. Similarly in Michigan, where he's 20 points behind his benchmark. And then looking a little further down the calendar, you've got more states Sanders ought to be winning, or maybe even winning big, like Utah and Wisconsin. You've got big states he's got to win, like Pennsylvania and California. Hillary's leading them all: by eight, two, twenty-two, and thirteen, respectively. There just isn't a single real bright spot for Sanders in the state polling we have right now. Overall, taking a rough average of all these future states, it looks like a Clinton +13 race right now. That's very similar to the numbers implied by the first three states that have voted, which were maybe consistent with a +11 race overall.

And this, by the way, makes me skeptical of the polls we're seeing showing more like a +5 Clinton race nationally, or the one that had Sanders leading for what is I believe the first time ever. If that's so, there has to be somewhere in this nation where he's doing better than you might expect given a tied race. But those national polls that are more optimistic for Sanders, that's basically where the single most optimistic individual state data-points for him are at. And that makes it tough to view them as anything other than outliers, or perhaps pollsters whose weighting algorithms are off.

But, we shall see.